Wednesday, October 17, 2012

I got up early this morning and undertook a task that I have been putting off for many months: the reorganization of the archival links to our contributors’ previous posts.

The system as it stood had become unwieldy and unsustainable. Three of our main contributors — Paul Weston, El Inglés, and Takuan Seiyo — were featured on our lower sidebar with a complete list of their previous posts. Their prolific writings (and Paul’s in particular) had caused that portion of the sidebar to metastasize into an unmanageable monster.

Each contributor’s archive is stored in my database, so designing a new system for them was just a matter of finding the time to program it. I built a series of permanent Blogger pages, one for each contributor, and put the full list of links there. Now there is only a list of contributors on the sidebar, just below the Amazon books, with links to those permanent pages.

This allowed me to include a number of people I hadn’t had room for before. Here’s a full list of contributors, with links to each designated page:

Fjordman is a special case — he was our first guest contributor, and I had written a special system for his posts long before I set up a table for the later arrivals. So, for the time being, his section of the sidebar will remain the same, with links to his most recent posts as well as to the Fjordman Files archive.

The sidebar is still much too large and confusing. Dymphna and I will continue to look for ways to reduce the clutter.